Drill-down to another report (column link)

September 8, 2011 by Igor Lozhkin

Ability to create hyperlinked values in report columns is an important feature of any reporting tool allowing to implement drill-down/drill-up solutions to either data details or aggregate data summaries as well as to other resources such as forms, charts, documents, etc. Arnica WebReport allows creating column hyperlinks with highly flexible integration logic, which may be specified at design time and executed on the server at runtime when user clicks on the hyperlinked value in a particular column.

To implement this example, we need two reports: 1) customer list, 2) customer orders per selected customer. The parent report (customer list) has column CustomerID configured as a hyperlink, which invokes child report (customer orders) and passes the value of CustomerID. The child report applies this value as a filter by customer and displays the list of orders for the selected customer.

Below is a screenshot displaying how the column hyperlink is configured to redirect from current report to a report with order details, passing customer identifier from the selected record:

The hyperlink is configured to execute HTTP redirect to a URL specified by the property Request Target. The value of CustomerID is passed via URL using evaluatable expression:

CustomerID=<%rtrim(SourceData.CustomerID)%>

Child report reads parameter passed from the parent report and applies its value to construct a query filter:

Here is a screenshot from the filter properties page of the filter selected above:

Other hyperlink actions, which may be configured on server side, are described by the options of the Request Type field:

Script - execute program script or SQL query on server side, and display result

Hyperlink may be configured to open new window or perform action within the same browser window, optionally show custom confirmation message, dynamically apply unique style to hyperlink presentation in each row, including conditionally suppressing the hyperlink itself for rows that match dynamic style expression, etc.

Other examples of reports with hyperlinked column values may be explored from Arnica Software demo site: